Advantages of Preferential Balloting

1. No more vote splitting or need for strategic voting so you can vote for who you want to not who you think has a chance to win.

2. All parties choose leaders and candidates this way, so it's quite hypocritical for any party to object to giving the general electorate a chance to vote this way

3. It's the best way to get our representatives to work together. With the present voting system the best way to get elected is to make your opponents look bad, that's why negative campaigning works so well. With Preferential Balloting you have to appeal to a wider spectrum of voters, by being too negative you run the risk of losing 2nd and 3rd round support. For a real life example consider the first Canadian Alliance leadership race. During the first ballot all the candidates where quite civil to one another. However for the second ballot when just Preston Manning and Stockwell Day where left things began to get much more negative and the resulting bitterness almost destroyed the party.

4. Preferential Balloting would make the job of polling much more difficult. People are more likely to become involved in politics and voting if the election is not a forgone conclusion.

5. It empowers your representatives because they are less beholden to their party, because they might have a chance to be reelected as an independent candidate if they still have wide support.

6. Less extreme people should be elected because 50% support is required not just 40% or less. Therefore our elected representatives should be able to work together in a more cooperative manner for the good of the Province.

7. This is a very minor change in our voting system and does not effect our parliamentary system and yet it would be a great improvement.

8. The only disadvantage is that it would require the ballets to be counted a number of times, which could add slightly to the cost of an election. However on the first ballot you could eliminate all the candidates except for the first 3 then only 2 more counts might be necessary. This modification would have very little impact on any of the advantages of the Preferential Ballot system.